10 FEB 2018 by ideonexus
The Thermian Argument
So there's a bad habit people have gotten into. It's nothing new, but it's become more and more common. It goes like this:
Critic: Hello. This is Folding Ideas. I recently watched the anime Women Getting Ripped Apart by Orcs and was, you know, disturbed by the seeming perverse glee the way the show takes the frequent and excessive dismemberment of its female cast members. In fact, the entire purpose of the show seems to be little more than showing women being brutally violated by orcs. Mino... 1 
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notes30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
The Rights Revolutions Erase Their Victories
The Rights Revolutions have another curious legacy. Because they are propelled by an escalating sensitivity to new forms of harm, they erase their own tracks and leave us amnesic about their successes. As we shall see, the revolutions have brought us measurable and substantial declines in many categories of violence. But many people resist acknowledging the victories, partly out of ignorance of the statistics, partly because of a mission creep that encourages activists to keep up the pressure...Folksonomies: civil rights social justice
Folksonomies: civil rights social justice
1 notes
notes30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Violence and the Concept of Social Justice
The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal system while the lower classes resort to what scholars of violence call “self-help.” This has nothing to do with Women Who Love Too Much or Chicken Soup for the Soul; it is another name for vigilantism, frontier justice, taking the law into your own hands, and other forms of violent retaliation by which people secured justice in the absence of ...Folksonomies: violence social status
Folksonomies: violence social status
1 notes
notes30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
The Bible is One Long Celebration of Violence
Like the works of Homer, the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) was set in the late 2nd millennium BCE but written more than five hundred years later.12 But unlike the works of Homer, the Bible is revered today by billions of people who call it the source of their moral values. The world’s bestselling publication, the Good Book has been translated into three thousand languages and has been placed in the nightstands of hotels all over the world. Orthodox Jews kiss it with their prayer shawls; witn... 1 notes
notesAlso mentions King Solomon and how his solution to carve a baby in half was horrific. The prostitutes must have known he was capable of doing it.
21 APR 2014 by ideonexus
History in "A Song of Ice and Fire"
In this, the obvious contrast is with the only work of fantasy to compare in terms of ambition and achievement to Martin's own: The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's Middle-earth, unlike Westeros, is the creation of a dauntingly learned scholar: his ambition was to fashion from the languages, literature and history of the early middle ages an invented mythology that would nevertheless retain the stamp of the period that had inspired it. Martin's approach is infinitely more slapdash. Just as the ch... 1 notes
notesASOIF contains many references to real history.
29 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Memetic Sex
There are many similarities between genes and memes. Just as genes transmitted during sexual intercourse in the biosphere, so are ideas trans¬ mitted during social intercourse in the mental realm, or ideosphere.
[...]
The memetic realm also hahas some important differences from the genetic realm. Memes combine, recombine, mutate, and reproduce much more flexly and rapidly than genes do. This is one way that genetic sex does not map completely to memetic sex. For example, the memetic count...
1 Many of the concepts in genes apply to ideas, including cross-breeding, safe-sex, inbreeding, and species.
14 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
Rosa Parks the Quiet Hero
For years before the day in December 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, she worked behind the scenes for the NAACP, even receiving training in nonviolent resistance. Many things had inspired her political commitment. The time the Ku Klux Klan marched in front of her childhood house. The time her brother, a private in the U.S. Army who’d saved the lives of white soldiers, came home from World War II only to be spat upon. The time a black eighteen-year-old d... 1 notes
notesShe was an introvert, but also one highly-trained in the art of passive resistance.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
The Cognitive Growth of Frankestein's Monster
Mary Shelley’s idea of the mind was, like Lawrence’s, based on the notion of the strictly physical evolution of the brain. This is how Lawrence was provocatively challenging his fellow members of the Royal College of Surgeons in his lectures of 1817: ‘But examine the “mind,” the grand prerogative of man! Where is the “mind” of the foetus? Where is that of a child just born? Do we not see it actually built up before our eyes by the actions of the five external senses, and of the ... 1 notes
notesThe monster grows according to Blake's hypothesis of cultural evolution.
28 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Three Characteristics of Stress to Avoid in Pregnancy
Researchers have isolated three toxic types. Their common characteristic: that you feel out of control over the bad stuff coming at you. As stress moves from moderate to severe, and from acute to chronic, this loss of control turns catastrophic and begins to affect baby. Here are the bad types of stress:
• Too frequent. Chronic, unrelenting stress during pregnancy hurts baby brain development. The stress doesn’t necessarily have to be severe. The poison is sustained, long-term exposu... 1 notes
notesFrequency, severity, and individual temperaments determine how much stress a person can experience while pregnant and have it affect the health of their baby.
06 APR 2011 by ideonexus
Intellectual Quackery in Academia
Intellectual quackery extends throughout the landscape of academia; tenured professors in the humanities and social sciences, on the right and left, are constantly purveying theories that are the philosophical, literary, and artistic equivalents of junk science. That many of the researchers consider themselves intellectuals is sad but unremarkable in the annals of quackery withing academia: junk thought with an intellectual patina fosters anti-intellectualism as effectively as junk science wi... 1 notes
notesThis is the worst form of junk-thought, because it comes from a source the public considers reliable, the Colleges and Universities.
